Climate services for finance, lessons learned and feedback for the public sector

There has been a recent increase in demand for climate data and insights on the potential impacts of climate change. This is particularly true in the finance sector - in the past 18 months financial regulators in the UK, Europe, USA, Canada and elsewhere globally have all stipulated that large and listed firms are legally required to understand their climate risk and do something to mitigate that risk. The finance sector is not well placed to generate these climate risk insights, motivating the rise of multiple climate risk data providers.

Climate X is a private-sector provider of climate risk analytics and services. Our in-house science team makes use of a wealth of publicly available data in the science that underpins the services we provide; data such as climate models and remote sensing data. We provide science as a service and deliver our data in a way that is useful and used within the finance sector.

I will briefly outline how we use publicly available data to derive climate risk information that is relevant to the finance sector, and how we deliver that data in away that is meaningful to our end users. I will discuss why the data in its raw form doesn’t address sector requirements, and feedback from the sector on how publicly available climate and remote sensing data is used. I will summarise lessons learned from our engagement with finance on how the public sector could provide data which is tailored to end user needs, and is more immediately relevant and useful for adaptation action in this industry.